


heroes don’t look like they used to

by immortalcockroach (juggyjones)



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Adventure, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Angst with a Happy Ending, Background Relationships, Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Found Family, Magic, Organized Crime, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pining, Plot Twists, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:21:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24011989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juggyjones/pseuds/immortalcockroach
Summary: Bellamy’s escape from the Tower is supposed to give him his happily ever after, yet it couldn’t be further from that. People across the country are living in fear of the outsiders, a mysterious illness is causing people’s bodies to decay while still alive, everyone he cares about has changed for the worse, and what he once called home is now closer to being a powder keg. On top of that, there is a year’s worth of his memories missing, and a feeling that there is more going on than he could imagine.The world as Bellamy knows it has never existed, and is in fact a much darker, bloodthirsty place than he could’ve imagined, and that comes from someone who has spent the last decade of his life under the command of none other than the exiled Marcus Kane.The key to all of that may just be the girl in the locket, guiding him through life, or the so-called Wanheda; the only problem is that Bellamy might just hate her enough to be willing to let the world rot instead.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, John Murphy/Raven Reyes
Comments: 16
Kudos: 23





	1. the tower

**Author's Note:**

> hello and welcome to _dora finally loses it and writes a massive monstrosity of a fic that she is a little too passionate about_! 
> 
> this is inspired by greek mythology, game of thrones, and six of crows, as well as taking some elements from the canon and remodelling them to fit the plot. there's a lot of characters who have minor roles, as this is genuinely a massive fic. i didn't put them down because then the character list would be insane. some of them are the same as in the show, some evil characters are now good and vice versa. the only prominent relationship is bellamy/clarke and there's mention of past bellamy/raven, and others i'm keeping quiet about for the sake of spoilers. 
> 
> there's a lot going on in this. i wrote 25k words aka three chapters and a bit of fourth in about 15 days. it's more fleshed out than any original novel i've tried to write. i'm super, _incredibly_ excited to finally share it with the world. also, while greek mythology itself won't be present, some of the characters/events are based on it (some loosely some very noticeably).
> 
> anyway, long story short, enjoy!
> 
> p.s: shoutout to [liya](https://iwearplaids.tumblr.com) for listening to me gushing about this sincei came up with the idea, ly

‘Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,   
To render with thy precepts less   
The sum of human wretchedness,   
And strengthen Man with his own mind.’   
—  _ Prometheus,  _ Lord Byron

heroes don’t look like they used to (they look like you do)

‘Your life can be more than just impossible decisions and a tragic end. You can choose to live.’   
— Wells Jaha, _ (The 100) _

one: the tower

At the age of twenty-two, Bellamy was on first-name basis with death. It was a ghost that haunted him in the dark, mocking him with its impeccable sets of teeth, waiting to open its jaw and swallow him whole. 

There were times when he couldn’t tell if that was his imagination, or just his cellmate, Roan. 

It wouldn’t particularly come as a surprise if they were the same thing. 

Here, in the Tower, every day resembled the other. The cell’s grey blended with the dullness of his thoughts, with only little scratches in the wall to mark the passing of time. His punishment wasn’t the isolation – it was the misery that came with it. 

‘Stop pondering,’ a voice came from his left, deep and rugged. ‘We got food.’

Bellamy had noticed, he just didn’t point it out. Sometimes he waited to see how long it would take Roan to say something. In most cases, it was exactly the amount of time it took him to finish his portion, first. 

He didn’t say anything. 

‘Not chatty today? Got something on your mind?’

‘Not hungry just yet.’

Roan kept musing to himself, to Bellamy, to whatever birds outside would listen, but Bellamy wasn’t the person for that. His fingers played with the pendant in the pocket of his trousers. It was cold, as it had always been, made of the same solid brass that Roan’s dagger had been forged from, and it was his token. 

Memories were a difficult thing to keep. 

‘Eat,’ said Roan. ‘It’s getting cold.’

‘What is it?’

‘Chicken legs with potato wedges. No spices. Gods, I miss spices. This might as well be chicken shit. Tastes all the same.’

Bellamy didn’t ask if Roan knew what chicken shit tasted like because it was Roan, and he was willing to bet that he’d tasted chicken shit. 

The man in the cell next to his was somewhat extraordinary. He’d arrived here at the same time as Bellamy, if he’s to be believed, and he told stories that would make the bravest man flinch. He was crass and loud and rough around the edges, but he’d taken a liking to Bellamy’s attempts at revolt. Neither of them wanted to be here; neither of them could remember why they were here, either, or much of their lives.

A crow cawed. Some of its feathers flew through the north window, landing on the wooden floor with more grace than they should’ve. They were not unlike the others, just a pile of black, fluffy feathers that Bellamy couldn’t bring himself to throw out, or do anything with. 

‘That contains germs,’ Roan had told him once, when he realised Bellamy was a collector. ‘It’s nasty and you’re going to give us both a nasty disease.’

‘It’s not like we’re not going to die here, anyway,’ had been Bellamy’s response.

Now, it was the only decoration either of them had. It sat almost right in the middle between the north and the west windows, the two Bellamy had been granted out of the total four on their level. They were placed high on the wooden wall, screaming with the opportunity of an escape yet just out of reach while standing on the mattress, which was about the most they could do. It was a wicked way to remind them of their lack of freedom; they cannot even make the choice to end their own lives.

Still, their size meant they got more than enough sunlight, and for a short time twice a day, the dark brown of the oak wall had a golden tint to it. Sundown meant that the light shone through Bellamy’s window, through the bars separating him and Roan, and landed on his cellmate’s stretched out legs, propped up on the mattress. 

Each of them got a third of the tower level. The remaining third was the stairs, but they were hidden away by the only brick wall they could see, broken by a hole big enough only for a daily meal on each side. They didn’t know what was below; they didn’t know what was above. All they heard were footsteps, once a day, up then down.

Every day was the same. Sometimes Bellamy’s thoughts ran in circles, too, and he couldn’t even tell. 

‘Eat, philosopher. Just looking at you having a plate full of food makes me sick.’

‘If it’s as shit as you say, what’s the point in eating it?’

‘You’re no good to me dead.’ Roan’s voice was harsh, and maybe in the beginning Bellamy would have believed it to be a threat, but he didn’t now, and hadn’t for a while. ‘It’ll get lonely without you. Who knows if they would throw another asshole, or just let you rot.’

‘Charming as always.’

‘Just eat your damn food, Bellamy.’

They both remembered the time when Bellamy hadn’t eaten. It was the very beginning of their imprisonment in the Tower and he had been naive enough to think that maybe, he was important enough so they wouldn’t let him starve. In the end, no one cared – there was no difference to them between a man and a corpse. Roan made him eat before he had withered away, even though the crows had already begun to sing their song of mortality. 

The crows hadn’t gone away. Bellamy found solace in the thought that eventually, they’d follow him to the peace only death can offer.

Bellamy ate his food. Like Roan had said, it tasted exactly like he would expect chicken shit to taste like. Maybe even a little bit like the resin on the wooden wall.

The day wore on. Nothing changed, apart from another few feathers falling into Bellamy’s share of the level. He just watched them, meaningless and unimportant, aside from being a bleak addition to how he perceived the passage of time. 

‘You make me depressed when you stare at that heap.’

‘Everything I do makes you depressed,’ Bellamy countered.

‘That’s not true. I value your idiotic stubborness and passion for noble, but meaningless deeds.’

Bellamy sighed. He made his way to the mattress he owned and plopped onto it. It had been a long time since he could sense how badly it stank of sweat, moisture, and whatever the Tower’s smell was. He stopped noticing how brown it was getting, or how it would creak more and more, and how the strings within it were starting to lose their composure. It was far from a comfortable bed, but it was a bed, and he wasn’t the one to complain anymore. 

‘I miss the time when you still had a spark,’ Roan said. It was more earnest than most things he would say. 

All Bellamy could do was agree with him, wordlessly, and wait until his eyelids became so heavy that he could no longer keep the nightmares at bay. 

It’s her face, again. He sees her look at him and she whispers, but no sound reaches him. He catches it with his hands, the words carried in the wind, but they are blown right past him. 

How is he supposed to know what she’s telling him? To understand?

She is but a face, and he is but a thought. 

He reaches for her, with hands he doesn’t have, yet the harder he tries, the further away she feels.

It doesn’t end. 

It never does. 

Mornings were like mornings – the sun shone bright in Bellamy’s eyes and Roan’s snoring was loud enough to make even the crows leave until he woke. Mornings were calm, too, when Bellamy stretched his legs and walked up to the window close to the brick wall of the stairs. The sky was blue, and the light seemed bright enough for a cloudless day.

There was a thought nagging him, in the back of his mind. He couldn’t figure out what it was, so he began doing his morning workout. It was an intense thing, getting more and more intense as his time in the Tower went on; he didn’t know if he’d ever need his muscles again, but there was no point in letting them go to waste, either. He trained as well as he could, keeping his health in-check, and what helped was Roan soon adapting a similar routine. They’d even shared some tips, correcting each other’s forms. 

Mornings were for Bellamy. 

By the time he finished with the first part of his routine, he walked over to the wall. The markings carved by Roan’s pocket knife were many, but he’d been economical about the space, so they took up less than a quarter of his part of the wall. They marked nearly a year. For what it’s worth, Bellamy believed himself to be twenty-two, almost twenty-three, but there was no way of knowing for certain. 

He carved another one. It was the same as others underneath his fingertips, shallow and uneven, but deep enough to stay. 

Bellamy went on with his routine. His thoughts went to his past, but there wasn’t much to find. 

Faces had blurry edges and the colours that differentiated shapes were too muted; it was as if he was seeing no one. Names were missing, too, only flashes of images remaining in his nightmares. When he wasn’t dreaming about the girl, he was haunted by his past. Neither of these were close enough for him to reach.

Roan woke with a groan. There were steps on the staircase, earlier than usual, and Bellamy’s fingers found the pendant in his pocket. 

Food came early. 

‘Must be a holiday,’ said Roan. He walked over to the brick wall, letting out a grunt when he saw the meal. ‘Or yesterday’s remains. Do you think someone starved to death? So they had extra?’

‘That’s disgusting.’

‘Yeah, I can’t believe they gave it to us twice. New method of torture, maybe.’ He was munching on a chicken leg that looked tiny in his large hands. 

Bellamy got his food, too, and had it in silence. There was no point in questioning their captors’ decisions. 

‘You know,’ Roan said, ‘there was one time when I slaughtered a bear with my bare hands, cooked it myself, and it still tasted better than this.’

Sometimes Bellamy wondered how it was possible that Roan remembered more of his life than Bellamy did. Sometimes he thought he was just lying to keep either himself or both of them entertained. Most of the time, he didn’t care. 

There was still a thought in the back of his mind. He couldn’t figure it out. 

The day came to an end. Tomorrow, they got food early again. It was the same disgusting meal; Bellamy was starting to get sick of it. His eyes kept wandering to the ever-growing heap of feathers, and he felt like there must’ve been a reason why not a single feather ever came to Roan’s side. 

There was a time, months earlier, when Bellamy did wonder where the feathers came from – if they had a purpose. Nothing was ever pointed to them being anything but what they were. He and Roan assumed it was the Tower’s infrastructure, combined with the constant presence of crows, that simply meant the wind blew the feathers only into Bellamy’s side. 

It was simple enough. It  _ should’ve  _ been simple enough. 

Bellamy couldn’t shake away the thought that there was something more to it. It was almost as if it didn’t matter where he looked, he would still see them in the corner of his eye. 

When it clicked, it  _ c l i c k e d,  _ and Bellamy hadn’t ever felt more alive.

He rushed to the feathers like a thirsty man to a well, nearly falling on his face, too. His fingers felt the tender feathers, the soft texture, and doubt crept into his mind but he pushed it away. There was no time for doubt. 

‘Did you finally found some use for the feathers?’ asked Roan. ‘You know, I could use a pillow. Or a blanket. You could, too.’

Bellamy looked at him, and smiled, and realised he couldn’t remember the last time he smiled. He breathed out, his chest full of air and freedom, and he’d felt as though he had broken the curse.

‘I’m getting the hell out of here.’

He sees her face in her dreams. She is smiling at him and he is smiling, too; her warmth engulfs him. His eyes are closed and he feels her, close to him, taking him to a place where he’ll be safe. 

She’s the light guiding him home. 

Someday, he’ll reach her. 

‘I’m coming to you,’ his voice says.

Wherever she leads him, he’ll go. 

Breaking out of the Tower is a tedious task. It’s sweaty and repetitious, and nowhere nearly as fast as Bellamy thought it would be. If Roan would help him out, it would’ve mattered a great deal, but the man simply sat in his part of the prison, watching him. 

‘I didn’t think you’d go insane this fast,’ he said one evening, after Bellamy had been working with the feathers for almost a week. ‘You seemed to have a lot more going for you.’

The dagger he’d let Bellamy have for the occasion shimmered with resin, as Bellamy’s strokes across the quill were steady and meticulous, until he made sure that the entirety of it was covered. He then pressed it to another feather, in a way that resembled a bird’s wing, and began working on the next quill. 

‘I’m not insane,’ he told Roan. ‘I’m just done being here.’

‘There’s no way you’ll be able to fly on that thing.’

The knife kept sliding. The feathers kept piling up, but there never seemed to be enough of them. 

‘What happens if I can’t fly?’

‘You fall,’ Roan said and to his credit, there was some sincere concern in his voice. ‘You die.’

Bellamy added the next feather. He looked at his cellmate, face serious, and asked, ‘And what happens if I stay?’

‘You can’t be serious.’

They were both aware that there was no future for them. Death was all that was awaiting them, eventually, whatever they would succumb to. Sometimes they’d joke about food poisoning being the thing that kills them, or that the Tower would be demolished in a bad storm, or hypothermia after the same thing. Sometimes they’d be realistic and think it would be an illness, a disease, something they couldn’t find. Old age would’ve been a big one if either of them thought they’d survive that long. 

The Tower itself wasn’t a death sentence, but it wasn’t anything else, either. 

Bellamy would rather be the one to decide it for himself. 

He didn’t say this to Roan, because the man understood him well enough. He just kept gluing the feathers with resin, ignoring how the whole place began to smell like it, and rested when he wasn’t doing it. Days went on and there was no need to rush. There was a sweet delight in knowing he’s doing it as best as he can, ensuring that all the feathers are glued together and strong even when he tries tugging them apart; no one is going to stop him. He was as safe in the Tower as he’d been all this time, and staying here for a couple days longer, if it means he gets to live, was the only thing that mattered. 

After some time, Roan accepted this was the new normal. They’d spent enough time together to understand one another well enough, and both of them knew once Bellamy had set his mind to it, he was going to see it through or die trying. 

In this case, literally. 

Roan sat in his side of the cell, huffing as he’d just finished his workout for the day. Bellamy watched him because he knew Roan wanted to be noticed, because it was Roan and he liked to be as present as possible. 

He’d lost a lot of weight. When they first woke up here, he was buff, muscle mass mixed with fat in a way that made him burly and fearsome, almost grizzly-like. His hair was cut short and he only had scruff, and there was a lot more pride and ego keeping him going. It wasn’t not something the Tower allowed; he simply couldn’t remain the same. The weight he lost was the weight that he didn’t need, instead he got leaner and more toned, his face losing some the chubbiness in his cheeks and sculpting the bones all around. His hair and jaw had grown out and he looked a little less burly, but just as grizzly, for all the different reasons. 

They’d both changed. There were no mirrors to compare themselves to, but Bellamy could feel his cheeks do the same thing, and the consistent workouts must’ve done a number on him. 

The Tower wasn’t kind. The Tower was merciless and brutal, but they were making the most of it. 

‘Are you seriously doing this?’

It felt a little futile to ask. Still, Bellamy said, ‘I won’t forgive myself if I don’t.’

Roan sighed. ‘I hope you don’t crash and burn.’

‘Me too.’

As Bellamy looked at his creation that was almost finished, Roan walked over to the bars separating them. He was glistening with sweat, as the temperatures around the Tower never went lower than boiling, and working out in that heat always took a lot of effort. 

His eyes scanned the room. He frowned, leaning his torso against the bars, and he reminded Bellamy a lot of what he thought a brother would be like. 

Maybe he had one, before this all happened. 

‘You still need to climb to the window,’ Roan said. 

‘I’ve got that figured out.’

‘How?’

Bellamy grinned. He’d been doing that a lot more recently, and really, it felt as if there’d been a spark lit aflame in his heart. Yes, there was a chance he wouldn’t survive, but the thrill of the sheer possibility was more than enough to give him  _ hope  _ – the one thing the Tower had managed to rip away from him once already. 

_ Not this time, _ he swore. He’s not letting it happen again. 

Now, he just laughed as he walked over to his bed, watching the sun fall in the orange light on Roan’s side. 

‘It’s a surprise.’

‘Bellamy.’

‘I’m keeping you entertained!’

‘Asshole,’ Roan said, but he grinned, too.

Bellamy’s hope was enough to bring some light into the burly man, too. Somewhere deep down, he knew he had that effect on people. Roan had called him a natural leader several times before, claiming his arrogance and irritability to come from years of experience of being disrespected, misunderstood, and having to fight to have his voice heard. But he was good with stories, with words, and making people feel the way he wanted them to. 

They didn’t know how or why Roan knew what that meant, or how that made him a leader. They could only assume that maybe, in the life before the Tower, they weren’t too different after all. 

He was going to miss him. 

She is a glimmer in the night sky, one of the stars that will eventually guide him home. He feels how far she is, but it doesn’t matter, because she’d follow him anywhere. 

Her face is there, and it’s as angelic as ever, but he can’t make it out. He never can, not fully.

What does she look like now? Years have gone by. 

She is a mystery, but his mystery, and his mystery that keeps him going, keeps him hoping. 

Someday, he’ll see her face, and he’ll know her. He’ll recognise the light always carrying him home; the light giving him hope even in the bleakness of the Tower. 

‘Hold on,’ his voice echoes the empty night, ‘wait for me.’ 

Her face fades and he is alone in the darkness, but it’s a darkness that feels like home, the darkness that awaits at the end of a journey.

‘I’m coming home with you.’

Goodbyes were far from Bellamy’s forte. He woke early in the morning, before the sun had even shone on his face, when Roan’s snores were at their loudest. It was a peaceful morning, with birds chirping around the Tower. There was a moment where he let himself stay in bed a little longer, savouring the experience. Nobody could guarantee him that this wouldn’t be his last morning. 

Bellamy pushed himself off the bed, and that was it. He wasn’t going to let negative thoughts cloud his judgement. If he did, he was never going to leave the Tower. 

Now or never. Whatever comes after, comes  _ after.  _

He worked with the last of the feathers, spread the last of the resin, until everything seemed to have finally come together. It was heavier than he thought it would be, but it was beautiful. 

As the sun rays bounced off the brown walls of his prison, the feathers of the wings basked in the light. The colours were magnificent; it was almost as if he could see every colour ever created, the strongest going from lightning blue to midnight black, all shimmering. It was powerful – magical, almost, he’d call it, if he believed in magic. Each of the wings was bigger and wider than he was long, maybe even longer than Roan, and the idea of himself being carried by the winds of the world made his heart beat with a feeling akin to delirium. 

He was the master of his own fate and he decided it would be beautiful. 

In the other third of the level, Roan stirred. Bellamy watched his eyes open and understanding washed over his cellmate’s face. His hair had been tied into a half bun, as it always was, and he looked at Bellamy with an unusual look.

‘So,’ Roan began, still in a horizontal position, ‘today is the day.’

‘Today is the day,’ Bellamy repeated. There was nothing better for him to say, but it seemed Roan was looking for a response of sorts.

‘How are you going to get to the window?’

‘Easy.’

‘Which means?’

‘Not telling you beforehand.’

‘Fine,’ was all Roan said. There was no snark to it, no humour. 

It occurred to him that maybe Roan felt all the gravity of the situation that Bellamy was pushing away. If he had to be hopeful for the both of them, so be it. 

Bellamy spent the rest of the morning listening to one of Roan’s many stories. It was a rare occasion that he actually asked for one, hearing it in the background as he made his way around the mattress he called his bed. The story got their minds off the impending future, and it put Roan in a bit of a lighter mood, so it did the job. 

It was a story about a girl and a boy who destroy the world and then save it. Bellamy thought it was cliche, and boring, but Roan said it was a story he believed he had grown up hearing. 

‘It was a part of my life,’ he said. 

He didn’t say that he wanted Bellamy to take it with him, but it hung in the air. 

Somewhere along the line, they had become friends. Roan was the only thing that made him not want to leave so badly, but the thought of leaving behind his only friend wasn’t enough to make him stay. 

Nothing was. Nothing ever could be. 

Freedom was a promise he’d given himself. 

By the time the sun reaches where Bellamy’s head would usually be, there is only a wooden floor. The mattress had been sliced and torn apart in square blocks, just big enough for two feet to stand on. They were strategically one smaller than the other, then stacked against the wall, underneath the window that looked out to the west.

West seemed like a good direction to go in. He wanted to go towards the sun. 

The inside of the mattress, as they’d come to discover, was horrendous. It was wooden planks with two layers of strings, held together by nails hammered into it. The outside layer made of hemp was as uncomfortable to cut as it was to sleep on. Roan gave Bellamy a hand in some of these chores, when he’d get tired of cutting and tying things together. 

Whatever story was that Roan was telling, Bellamy didn’t hear. His mind was elsewhere; dreaming of the wind on his skin, of the clouds in the sky, of the green of the grass and brown in the trees. It was dreaming of all the colours he could remember, of nature that was so vivid in his memories that it might as well have been the only thing. 

Whatever, wherever home was, he was going back to it. 

Drowsiness washed over him. Doubt crept into his mind, but he asked Roan to speak louder, and pushed it away. 

At around the middle of the day, when the shadows on the wooden planks beneath their feet seemed to be equal on both sides of the level, Roan had finished tying the hemp on Bellamy’s back. 

‘You look like a bug,’ he told him. 

Bellamy grinned. ‘Hopefully one that can fly.’

‘Or the one that gets squashed on the ground.’

‘Cheer up, Roan. I’m not dead yet.’

‘Might as well be,’ muttered Roan, and turned away from him.

_ Leave him be,  _ Bellamy told himself.  _ There’s nothing you can do.  _ The only thing that would’ve made Roan stop sulking was Bellamy deciding not to make a break for it, but that was off the table. 

Instead, Bellamy walked over to the middle of his part of the level, and examined his invention. It was essentially shaped as a backpack, with four ropes across his chest, two vertical and two horizontal. They were thick and crafted by Roan, who seemed to have a skill with turning hemp into something actually useful. On the back, they were coated with resin and feathered wings stuck to them, strong enough to resist even Roan tugging at them. 

It was heavy. It was tight, too, but Bellamy had wings on his back and a hemp rope wrapped around each palm, with resin in a makeshift hemp sack at his hip. Roan’s dagger would stay with Roan, so they carved a piece of the wooden planks that would serve as both a dagger and a brush for the resin. 

The sun had left the highest point in the sky. It was time. 

Bellamy turned to Roan, whose back was still facing him. ‘I’m going to do it.’

When Roan turned around, his face was the one of a stoic – or maybe a warrior. It would’ve been easy to picture Roan leading the vanguard in a battle, persuading people in his cause. 

‘Don’t be a bug that gets squashed.’

‘I won’t,’ Bellamy assured him. ‘It’ll take a lot more than just the world to tear me down.’

If Roan had any more thoughts on this, he didn’t care to share. Instead, he extended a hand in-between the pars and took hold of Bellamy’s forearm. The curly-haired man did the same; it was a gesture all too familiar, even though they’d never done it. 

‘Stay clear of the far north,’ Roan said, in a low voice. ‘You’re not welcome there.’

It wasn’t a threat, but a warning. 

Bellamy didn’t ask. He knew Roan couldn’t give him answers to any of the questions he had. 

In the end, the escape became a lot less graceful and noble than he’d pictured it being. Climbing on a makeshift ladder made out of pieces of his mattress was demotivating, almost, with Bellamy twisting his ankle during one of the times he’d fallen off of it. In the end, when finally he stepped on the window ledge, it was everything he’d ever thought it would be. 

It was glorious. 

He could see the world; it spanned miles and miles and miles, and the sun high in the sky made the red desert look almost golden for as far as his eyes could see. There were no villages, or inhabited places, or settlements; he’d need to fly a good distance to ensure his journey to other people wouldn’t take too long, but it wasn’t something he could really think about. The redness of what he assumed must’ve been sand was more striking than any colour he’d ever seen, more breathtaking than anything his mind could conjure up as it stretched into infinity.

Months; that was how long it had been since he’d last laid his eyes on something other than the grey of the stone wall, the smudged beige of the mattress, and the dark brown of the wooden planks. It had been so long that if it wasn’t for Bellamy constantly replaying the images of nature, of the sky, of the clouds in his mind, he would’ve forgotten the sight. 

So he said to Roan, emotion evident in his voice, ‘It’s beautiful.’

It was more than that, but there were no words good enough. 

‘Take care of it for me,’ Roan said to him, voice filled with quiet longing. ‘I’ve always loved the aspen woods.’

‘I’ll carve your stupid hairstyle in one of them.’

‘Make sure you’ve got the hair tie included. It’s linen. That’s the thing I’m the proudest of.’

‘I’ll try.’

There was a moment of silence as Bellamy took the resin out of the sack and applied it to the hemp on his palms. He felt Roan’s eyes on him; he felt the Earth’s wind on him, too, and it felt like freedom.

Once he’d let the resin soak into the hemp, he put the dagger back into its place. The edges of the wings had been measured to the length of his hands, extending just a little beyond his middle finger, and it stuck perfectly. The resin was strong enough for this. He moved his hands a little, and the feathers rustled behind him. He felt them; they were an extension of him. 

‘How high is it?’ 

Bellamy did the one thing he’d been avoiding: looking straight down. 

A breath hitched in his throat and he held onto the edges of the window a little more tightly, feeling himself sinking back into the Tower, ever-so-slightly. His hands shook and his body trembled, but he bit his lip until he felt the familiar metallic taste and reminded himself why he’s doing it. 

‘Tolerable,’ he answered. ‘Enough to fly.’

Bellamy didn’t have a knowledge of aerodynamics—he felt it had been someone else’s job to take care of, before the Tower—but he was good with hunches. What he’d told Roan was a little of an understatement, as the drop from the ledge of his window to the ground would be higher than any building he’d ever seen, higher than a hundred levels, if not two – it was so far he could hardly see the bottom. But it was there, it was red scattered between a grey circle, and it was something he wasn’t going to touch. 

His fingers fished for the pendant in his pocket. The smell of brass found him and soothed him, eased him into whatever was to come. He saw her face, angelic yellow lines framing her face in waves and blue eyes that drew him in, and he knew that she was leading him away. 

She had been leading him towards the sun ever since he found himself in the Tower. 

‘You know,’ Roan began. ‘I am starting to think we were kings. Before the Tower.’

Bellamy looked at him, really  _ looked  _ at him, knowing this was, for all it was worth, his last time ever doing so. 

Roan looked a little sad. But there was a smile playing in the corner of his lips, and his face was lit from the sun shining on all sides of the level, and he looked powerful enough to make Bellamy think that maybe he was right; maybe Roan was a king, before. 

‘Maybe you,’ he replied. ‘I’m not made of king material.’

The burly man laughed, and it was more honest than any time he’d done that before. ‘Go fly, you crow.’

And fly he did. 

Before his feet lost the support of the ledge, Bellamy had spread his arms wide and closed his eyes. Roan’s shriek echoed throughout their level and the wind carried it with Bellamy, down,  _ down  _ towards the grey circle. His heart was threatening to burst through the ribcage and the wind whistled beside his ears as he felt the air resistance slow him down. 

Bellamy was falling. Slower, and slower, until the whistles turned to whispers and he could no longer hear Roan screaming his name. 

His eyes remained closed. 

He relaxed. 

He began to move his hands, his wings.

At some point, he realised, he had made peace with death. It would be not a stranger waiting to drag him away, but an old acquaintance, waiting to take him to where he now belonged. 

If Bellamy had died in the fall, he would have been okay with it. 

That was why when he relaxed, he began to breathe all over again, and his heart slowed to its normal pace. He calmed down, felt sweat dripping down his nose, his cheeks, his ears, his chin; he felt the wind take the drops away, fanning his body where it had overheated. 

Nature sang to him. It was a haunting melody, beautiful, echoing inside every part of his body; he was but a stranger in this land, high up in the clouds, feeling the condensation soft against his cheeks. His fingers stretched and its tips touched the feathers, the one thing saving him from losing his newfound freedom. The melody resonated even to those very tips, almost as if the wings carried it, too.

It was a song he’d heard before. It was nature singing to him, calling him home. 

_ I am coming,  _ he thought.  _ Home, I am coming to you.  _

This was home. Wherever he would decide to go, it would lead him home. His heart knew the way. 

Bellamy’s eyelids fluttered lightly, frightened, until he parted them. The ground below him was farther away then it had been when he jumped, an ocean of red. He relaxed his body into the wings and gave in to the familiarity, to the way his soul seemed to recognise and predict the movements of the wings, and he left himself to turn around. 

The Tower was a mere blotch of darkness in the distance. It was like a painting; half red and half blue, with a thick line of brown to connect them. 

An airy laugh escaped his chest, big and victorious. 

He was  _ free. _

His body was aware that it was flying yet it was far from an unnatural sensation. It was the opposite, almost, as Bellamy couldn’t recall ever feeling more  _ right  _ than in this very moment. Air tickled at every inch of his skin exposed underneath his shirt, through the sleeves of his trousers, on the lips he’d licked with his tongue. He was victorious, glorious, and he couldn’t imagine he had ever lived a life without this. 

Towards the west, he flew. The red desert kept going as far as his eyes could see, and he kept flying, letting the wind take over. Once he had flown, he couldn’t recall what walking was like. 

Nature kept singing. 

Bellamy kept flying. 

He flew for what must’ve been hours, or could’ve been mere seconds. His perception of time had been long lost. Now, his lips were chapped and arms tired, and the wind seemed to be the only thing keeping him going. Whatever the price of freedom was, Bellamy was starting to feel it. 

He was getting tired. And tired, when you’re hundreds of miles up in the air, is far from good. 

Nature sang a little louder; the melody became a little more haunting. It was all high tones that he now realised weren’t coming from anywhere in particular, but instead resonated within every part of his body. It was one with him, just like the wings were, just like his limbs were. It was high and slow and he somehow knew it didn’t exist outside of him. 

It was a siren call, dragging him into a memory he couldn’t grasp. 

The sun was still high in the sky and it seemed as if it hadn’t moved; Bellamy dared to look at it.

Whatever it was, it was familiar, and the song had grown a little stronger than the howls of the wind. Bellamy flapped his wings and flew a little higher. Higher, again, until the sun began to have lines, and he’d realised that the brightness of the yellow were strands of silky blonde hair; until he saw the full cheeks and the closed eyes and the delicate eyebrows and the lips singing the song, calling him higher,  _ higher _ . 

_ Wait for me,  _ he thought. 

She was calling out to him, her peaceful face, and it wasn’t a dream. 

He flapped his hands and his wings and pushed against the wind, against his body screaming in protest, his muscles tearing as he pushed and pushed and  _ pushed  _ just to get another glimpse of her. His eyes ached, burned, but he persisted. 

He couldn’t stop. Not now. Not when she was so close. 

The song had grown louder and it was carrying him more than the wind did, and he wondered if it was her, if this was his purpose, if he’d lived long enough to fulfill it. If here, over the sea of red and gold, was where he’d meet the star that had been guiding him through life for as long as he’d been— as he’d been—

A memory escaped him, narrowly, and he pushed air with the tips of his fingers. Tears were streaming down his face and he couldn’t tell if he was crying or if his eyes were burning –  _ is there a difference? _

_ Please,  _ he begged.  _ Let me— _

The thought escaped him. 

He felt as if, could he get closer to her, he would’ve understood everything. He would’ve understood what he couldn’t remember and he would’ve understood how his life mattered and he would’ve understood why it was important for him to keep going when he felt like he just  _ couldn’t.  _

If he could get closer. A little closer.

Just a little bit. 

Then he’d get close enough. 

Then he’d be saved. 

Her face was there, in the sun, right in front of him, and flew higher and higher until his bones began to tremble and his chapped lips tasted of metal and sick and the wax in the feathers had frozen and he had felt himself going stiff. 

Her face was all that mattered. If he could just— Then everything would— And he would see—

‘Save me,’ he whispered, quietly, but his lips didn’t budge.

Her face was the last thing his eyes saw before they gave in. His fingers stretch through the agony, up, up up  _ up  _ towards her, and if he could just reach her, maybe she would save him, one last time. 

When Bellamy fell, the wax in his feathers stiffening to the point where they were as good for flying as wooden planks, he had her face embedded in the back of his eyelids. Her song followed him as he plummeted, through the skies, through the wind, through anything that could’ve saved him; his body was on fire.

Nature sang to him, for him, about him, as it took his life. 

Red desert swallowed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading this! i just reread this and there are so many hints and nods as to what happens later in the plot ahhh i'm wondering if you guys would be able to catch them all! i think the next update should be in about a week, so keep an eye out for that.


	2. red desert

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bellamy awakens from the fall, but that is far from where his troubles end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's thursday! the update day! i loved this chapter. aside from that, i just wanted to say that season 7 is absolutely great and i loved yesterday's episode.  
> enjoy!
> 
> p.s: the title is from _red desert_ by 5 seconds of summer. the lyrics partially apply to the story (specifically this chapter) and the melody fits the vibe. worth a listen.

‘I hoped today might be a good day. Hope is a dangerous thing.’  
— Colonel MacKenzie _(1917)_

two: red desert

Death comes for him peacefully.

The song is quiet. He sees her face in the darkness, just a little lighter than what surrounds it. Her lips are moving and her face is weeping. 

She cries for him.

 _It’s okay,_ he thinks. He tries to tell her that. 

_I knew this would happen._

He reaches for her, but the darkness takes her away. Maybe it’s for the best. 

_Don’t cry for me._

She’s gone. 

All that’s left in her place is a green light, calling out to him.

_My freedom._

_My death._

He slipped in and out of consciousness. He could only stay awake for so long until agony ate him up, and he’d fallen victim to it again.

When he was awake, his body was on fire. 

He jumps. The water is cold, freezing to his bones, but he swims away from the light. It’s his freedom he’s swimming towards, dark and unknown, but his. Nothing matters more. 

The moon shines his way. The laughter he leaves behind fades away, as do the voices he’d grown to hate. 

Cicadas are loud. They are calling to him. 

His fingers are wrapped around a small brass pendant. 

Above him, a crow shows him the way. 

‘Drink,’ a voice said. 

He felt cold liquid on his lips, tasteless once it reached his tongue. He held himself strong long enough to swallow, before the darkness took him back. 

He is in the Tower. He trembles, because Roan’s skeleton is all he can see through the bars. 

He falls, because the sun doesn’t shine anymore. 

Is this what would’ve been of him if he’d stayed?

Is this how it would’ve ended?

_Is this how it ends?_

Coughing woke him up; he couldn’t breathe. There was something stuck in his throat. 

Someone reached in and he found himself gagging as they pressed fingers to the back of his throat. Taste of bile filled his mouth. Two fingers held something thin, and white, that looked a little too much like bone. 

He passed out. 

He hears laughter behind him and waves crashing in front of him. His feet are buried in the sand. He lets warmth wash over him. 

Someone calls his name; a girl with brown hair. 

He kisses her. 

Her lips taste like honey. 

Someone joins them, and they run into the water, all together. The same person sings the song, haunting and beautiful, full of life and love. It’s their song.

He goes underwater and drowns, almost, stays under it until he can no longer breathe. Life is about little things. 

Life is about reminding yourself you haven’t died yet. 

When his eyes opened, they couldn’t see. 

He was on his stomach, head pressed to the right. His back burned with a pain unlike anything he’d ever felt before, yet he couldn’t scream. He couldn’t do anything. Fingers trailed along his skin, leaving scorching marks where they’d touched it. 

There was no way to tell if they were helping him or torturing him. 

It felt as if his bones were being moved about; his spine reassembled.

This time, darkness was a saviour. 

He sits at the front of a table, watching everything fall apart. People around him are screaming at one another but the sound is muffled; is he there at all? 

They ask him for help, for his thoughts, for advice, but he remains quiet. There is nothing he can say; there is nothing he can do. 

He is not their god. 

They are desperate but so is he. People he knows and loves are in pain, people he knows and loves are dying, and there’s nothing he can do about it. Has he not done enough? Has he not suffered enough? 

They scream, and shout, and beg him to do something, _anything_. 

He remains quiet. 

He is not the man they believe him to be; he is not the man he presents himself to be. Some of them know this, and those who do, are looking at him with weary faces. 

Haven’t they suffered enough? 

They’ve given their lives for these people, for keeping them safe. They’ve done everything. 

Yet the people fight, and argue, and complain, and place blame on the ones who tried to help them.

His friends keep looking at him with weary eyes. They are all tired; so tired. But they know better than to argue. They know this is the only way. They know time is running out, and if he has to do whatever it takes, that’s how it’ll be. 

When he gives in, they worship him. 

_Is this how it ends?_

His fingers. He could feel his fingers. 

His lips parted and he felt his shaky breath on them, cold against his open wounds. He could feel his body, all of it, but as if it were a shell; it was numb. He couldn’t move it. 

His eyes were closed. 

When he tried opening them, he slipped out of consciousness again.

She waits for him, in the darkness. The light around here is a little brighter. Still, she’s worlds away. 

He doesn’t reach for her. 

_Where have you gone?_ he wonders. _Why did you give up on me?_

She doesn’t reply; she never does. 

He sits, and watches her fade away. 

_Is this how it ends?_

Death was supposed to be peaceful. 

The water brings him to a dock not unlike the one he’d just jumped off. He’s shaking and trembling and freezing, and he falls on his knees. The crow lands on his shoulder, pecks the top of his ear, and flies to the shoulder of a girl with a brown ponytail. 

He watches the crow become a boy. 

Neither of the two are any older than himself; younger, even. 

_Please,_ he says. 

They bring him to his feet. The crow-boy gives him a jacket, and the girl hooks an arm around his waist. Step by step, they lead him into a shack, not too far from where he swam out. 

He doesn’t fear them and they do not fear him, either. 

His heart knows them. It’s as if they were meant to find one another, from the very creation of the Universe. 

_Murphy,_ says the Crow. 

_Raven,_ says the girl. 

_Bellamy,_ says he.

This is how it begins.

Bellamy came to life with a gasp, loud and clear, and he was _awake._

Nobody came to him. He resisted the urge to open his eyes, move, to do anything, until he had made sure that it was safe. All he wanted to do was run away, but he didn’t even know if that was a possibility. There was no way to tell how much of what had been happening was real. 

The last memory he had—

He shook the thought out of his head. Whatever happened to him, there was no point dwelling on a death that didn’t go through. 

Instead, Bellamy focused on the little things. It took some time, as if he were relearning how to use his body, but he managed to get the hang of his fingers. Little needles filled them right up to the tips when he moved them, and the rush of blood was the best sign of being alive he’d had since the fall. 

Something rustled in the distance; Bellamy stilled. 

Whatever the sound was, it didn’t happen again, so he let himself move the fingers on the other hand, too. His toes followed. He gritted his teeth as he was doing so; pain began to absorb his body as blood rushed to different parts of it. His vision started going white even beneath his closed eyelids, but he fought it off. 

He concentrated on the pain instead of ignoring it. Once he’d accepted it and focused on locating the sources of the pain, he learned he could locate his weak spots: muscles, most of all. 

Muscle atrophy. Bellamy had that once, years ago, when he sprained his ankle during a raid, and it nearly cost them their lives. It took him months to recover, and his leg hadn’t been the same since. Things like these were a common occurrence they couldn’t afford, yet they had to. 

His fingers reached in the pocket of his trousers, except they hit bare skin where the fabric should’ve been. 

Underneath the blanket, he was naked. 

Bellamy felt his heart starting to race so he closed his eyes, focused on it, and tried to calm down as much as it was humanly possible in this situation. Whatever was happening, he was going to get through it, figure his way out of the situation. 

He looked around, for what felt like the first time. The room he was in was small, filled with various trinkets that he didn’t recognise. There was a wooden desk pushed in a corner with a kerosene lamp sitting on it, the only source of the light, as far as he could tell. Bundles of papers were scattered across the desk, taped to the wall behind it – some of them had a symbol that looked like an eight, only it was horizontal. Bellamy had never seen it before. 

The wall, too, was quote odd; it didn’t look much different than mud castles they’d make as kids, with some gravel added in the mix. Now, he could feel the heavy smell of the place, too. No air filtration, no nothing to displace the way the sand mixture felt unnatural on his lungs. He could taste dust, even. 

Bellamy pushed himself up on his elbows. He ignored the pain in his back, gritting his teeth and breathing only through his nose as he did so – it was excruciating. His ankle ached, too, when he moved it so he could sit up. With his legs hanging off the wooden plank that was supposedly his bed, he let himself take another moment to rest. 

Then he got up. 

It was blinding pain, at first, and he had to hold onto the plank to stay on his feet. He grunted, against his will, and spat out blood. 

Maybe it was his lip, cut. Maybe it was internal bleeding. There was no way to tell. 

The blanket had fallen off of him so he picked it up and wrapped it around himself as decently as he could, which wasn’t much, but it would have to do. Looking around, he saw many more of those eights in different shapes and forms, all over the room. Whoever’s room he was in, they were obsessed with this sign. Bellamy walked over to the desk and picked up a paper; it was written in a language he didn’t understand, but he recognised. 

_The Old Language,_ he thought. There was a phrase Bellamy recognised from its religious connotations, _wigod em op_ and a word, _wamplei_. ‘Forgive him’ and ‘death’; Bellamy had a feeling if he took a closer look at the notes, he’d find more words and phrases he’d recognise, and it would lead to the conclusion that they’re about him. 

It was a gut feeling, but Bellamy had long ago learned to trust his instinct. 

‘You’re not supposed to be walking.’

He turned on his heel, papers flying, his hands raised in front of him, fingers curled up in fists. 

The person at the entrance into the room was a girl around his age, with dark skin and short ashy-white hair, wearing something that seemed like a lavender cape with a brown crop top and beige shorts underneath. Her expression was one of boredom, if slight irritation, but her stance screamed she wasn’t threatened by him in the slightest. 

‘I don’t—’ he began, but then crouched and picked up the blanket that he’d lost again, and covered his modesty. If he wasn’t feeling entirely uncomfortable and out of place already, maybe he would’ve cared a little more. ‘I don’t know what’s happening.’

The girl waved a hand in a vague gesture. ‘Get back to your bed. You’re in no state to be up, no matter how good you might be feeling.’

Bellamy obeyed. He had a thousand questions, but all he could really think of was how helpless he was. 

‘Put this on.’ She threw him a pair of underwear that she’d taken out of a box next to the desk. ‘I don’t want to see anything that I didn’t need to see.’

‘You took my clothes off,’ he reminded her as he put on the boxer shorts, underneath the blanket, then let it fall. ‘You could’ve put these on.’

‘Your clothes were scorched when I found you. Is that really what’s your concern right now?’

‘No.’

‘Do you trust me?’

He thought about it. ‘No.’

She sighed, running a hand through the white hair. He’d never seen someone who managed to colour their hair so fully, and for whatever reason, it was more fascinating than he would like it to be. 

The desk creaked when she sat on it. Her eyes landed on the papers, and she sighed. ‘I see you’ve done some research.’

‘Look, I don’t have time for chatting. Just tell me where—’

‘If it weren’t for me, you would be dead,’ she said. ‘I think you should behave with a little more respect.’

Bellamy tried to swallow, but his throat was dry. She noticed, told him to wait a minute, and came back with a jug filled with water, and a glass. Instead of giving it to him, she placed them both on Bellamy’s bed and walked back. 

If this was poison, he didn’t care. If she wanted to kill him, she would’ve done it already. 

Bellamy drank straight from the jug until it had run empty. 

She came back with another jug but before she gave it to him, she said, ‘Take a big gulp and hold your water for half a minute. Most of your thirst comes from the dryness of your mouth. If you drink too much, you’ll get sick.’

He listened, and she was right, so he figured she wasn’t trying to kill him. 

‘Do you trust me now?’

Bellamy thought about it. ‘I distrust you a little less.’

‘Good enough. Put the blanket on the bed and lie down. I’ll bring you some food. Don’t snoop around my things if you want me to tell you what’s going on.’

When she left, Bellamy did as he was told, and he felt a little bit of his dignity going up in flames. 

Lying on the soft blanket, he thought how he’d always been touchy about his pride. Most of the time, it meant that he was always right, and that he’d do whatever he wanted to do and not what people told him to. He didn’t trust people, either, unless they earned their trust. It was a long road to be trusted by Bellamy, but people who did it became the people he would lay down his life for. 

Bellamy, most of all, had always been an all or nothing kind of person. 

It was no longer a possibility. 

The girl came back with a plate and something on it that looked an awful lot like the biggest scorpion he’d ever seen. She let him eat in peace, sorting the papers he’d thrown off the desk when she entered. It looked just as much like a mess as it did before he’d touched it, but it was obvious it meant something to her. 

He finished the scorpion. His stomach ached almost immediately. 

‘You’ve not eaten a proper meal in a long time,’ she said. ‘Your body is no longer used to eating like that.’

’How long?’ His voice betrayed him. ‘How long have I been…like this?’

She turned around with a heavy expression on her face, leaning against the desk. Her eyes were serious and it looked as if she was wagering what to say, and it made Bellamy clench his hand into fists behind his back. 

‘I think it’s time you lie back down. You’re not strong enough yet.’

‘No, tell me—’

‘You will lie down and go to sleep or I’ll do it myself.’

Something in him broke. He did as instructed, without another word. When she walked over, she placed something small and cold on his chest, but he didn’t dare look at it until he heard her footsteps leave the room. 

The thing on his chest was his pendant. His fingers gripped around it, feeling the brass against the dry skin of his fingertips – it felt like home. The pendant itself was intact from whatever happened to him, its circular shape still resemblant of a small compass. Although, unlike a compass, when opened, his locket revealed a faded painting of a young girl with blonde hair. 

He didn’t know her who she was, or where the pendant came from, but he knew this: ever since he’d acquired it, his life had been making a lot more sense. He also knew this: whoever she was, she had guided him through life enough so that without her, he would have died a long time ago.

Bellamy let his hands fall to his sides, feeling the darkness creeping in on him. Inside his right fist, right where it had always belonged, was the pendant.

She waits for him, in his dreams. They don’t talk this time. 

He doesn’t reach for her.

Instead, he asks, ‘Why did you leave me?’

She doesn’t answer.

He doesn’t ask again. 

When he looks where she was, he can’t recall ever seeing her there. 

He’s not even sure she was here at all.

Lonesomeness is a quiet thing.

Each awakening became less painful than the one before. The second time he woke up, he learned his saviour’s name was Gaia and she gave him some more food, and that time, it all came back up. It was a recovery process; she told him not to worry about it. 

When he asked about how long he’d been there, she wouldn’t answer. 

With time, he learned to stop asking. 

About two weeks since he’d first woken up, Bellamy was starting to move around the place. The room he woke up in was Gaia’s office of sorts, and although she wouldn’t explain what the symbol was, or why she was writing in the Old Language, he figured it was some sort of religious thing. Bellamy, who firmly believed if gods were to exist they would have given up on humanity a long time ago, didn’t really care. 

Outside that room was a hallway made of the same muddy material and filled with same heavy air that smelled dusty and dry. It was empty to the point it felt hollow, like a hole in an ant’s colony. Gaia had told him a few days before that her place was built under a desert. Now, Bellamy walked through the hollow part and entered what was supposed to be the living and dining room, but was just a couch made of layers of fabric, a small table made of clay, and a dining table with a chair at each end. It smelled like dust and it smelled like candles, and Bellamy realised he’d stopped noticing it anymore. 

He sat on the couch. Walking took a lot of effort, even if he could do it a lot easier now, but he still found himself winded. 

Gaia entered the room a couple of minutes later, with a meal for them both. Fox meat, today. Bellamy didn’t want to ask how, or when, she was catching their food. 

‘You’re going to answer my questions at some point,’ he told her, once they were both sitting at the table, in the middle of their meal. ‘You can’t keep me in the dark forever. Or here, for that matter.’

‘What makes you think you’re ready to know?’

‘What makes you think I’m not?’

The smile on Gaia’s face when she put the fox leg back on the plate was one Bellamy hadn’t seen before. She leaned back in the chair and wiped her hands against one another. 

Bellamy did the same. 

‘How long do you think you’ve been here?’

‘At least two months.’ He didn’t miss a beat. His nose scrunched and his brows furrowed. ‘Probably more.’

‘Okay.’

‘How long has it been, really?’

Gaia parted her lips, then pressed them back together. Her fingers tapped against the clay table. Bellamy was starting to hate the clay. The candles and the dust and the silence, too, but the clay somehow irked him the most. 

His body was stiff. His muscles ached. Whatever Gaia’s answer would be, he didn’t care, as long as it meant he could get out. Leave. Go _home._

‘A week from now, it’ll have been six months.’

Bellamy’s body crashed in on itself. His mind stopped working for a moment, as he rewrote everything he knew about what had happened in his recent history. 

Six months felt like a lifetime. 

‘Are you ready to know the full story?’ Gaia’s voice was playful, almost challenging. _Are you brave enough?_ it felt as if she were asking. ‘To face the gods?’

‘A little dramatic,’ Bellamy said, but he nodded. 

Shock was already there. His appetite was gone and a cold itch had spread throughout the insides of his entire body, and he felt like there was nothing that could make it worse. He’d rather have Gaia throw it all on him and deal with it in one go, than take it bit by bit. 

All in or nothing. This was his choice. 

’Some of these things, I was there for,’ Gaia said, before she began. ‘Some, you told me in your hypnagogic state. Others, I heard from your nightmares.’

And so Gaia told the story. It wasn’t just a recounting of events, but a legend, almost, and she spoke the words with grace that made it seem akin to a tale a preacher would tell. Bellamy just listened. 

It was a tale about a boy who’d flown too close to the Sun. 

He found himself in a tower, locked away for sins he could no longer remember. Was he guilty? Was he innocent? Who was the one deciding? It didn’t matter, in the end, because he was locked up in the tower despite the truth. Truth, in life, often matters less than agenda. He was a victim of that, or at least the world seemed to believe so. 

The boy spent a long time in the tower, hidden away from the world for secrets he had to keep. There was only one man to keep him company, a prisoner like himself; a boy whose crimes, too, had been long forgotten. 

Identity became a thing of history. They were who they were in the Tower, and the Tower devoured who they were. 

Time passed. The boy was righteous, not unlike many heroes the world whispered about, and his story was far from over. The world wouldn’t let him rot away in the Tower – the world needed him. 

Crows were his friends. They had been his friends since he was very little, in many shapes and forms, but it was now that they decided that he deserved something from them – something more permanent than anything else they had given him. They felt him decay, they felt his soul fade away, and they couldn’t let that happen. So they cawed, until every crow in the world had heard it, and feathers fell into his prison. 

The boy found hope. His decay stopped, but the crows never left. They kept letting go of their feathers, letting him have it, as a token of their gratitude and loyalty, for he was their king. 

It took him a while, but the boy made himself wings, just like the ones of the crows themselves. More and more, without knowing them, he was becoming the person he’d been before the Tower. And so the time came, when the boy spread his wings and dared to jump. He flew, the first person ever to do so, and he flew with courage and faith in life. It was then that his eyes took notice of the sun, and of the face in it, for the sun was calling to him. She’d been his guide and he’d loved her as much as the crows loved him, worshipped her. She was calling to him and he could resist; all he could think was the possibility that if he could fly higher, he’d reach her. 

So he did. He flew higher and higher and higher until his fingers started to freeze, and his body started to freeze, and she was just as far as she’d ever been. The wax in his wings froze and the wings had gone stiff, and he couldn’t fly anymore. 

The boy fell. He fell through the clouds, so fast, that his body had set on fire. His wings burned and he looked like a demon; the stars mourned when he fell. The red desert swallowed him, broke him, healed him just enough to keep him alive. It wasn’t his time yet; the gods couldn’t let him sleep. Instead, before he’d reached the river of death, they brought him back. They breathed life into him, and hoped for the best.

It took months of recovery, months of nightmares, months of his wings settling inside his spine. He was no longer the man in the Tower, or before it; he wasn’t the man who had fallen, either. He was someone new, something else together, crafted by gods themselves. Time went by and he healed, inside out. He’d been tired, he’d been lost, but it was his time to wake up. 

It was time for him to find the Commander of Death, and end the curse that had been destroying their people for centuries. It was time for him to become the—

Bellamy didn’t let her finish. ‘Okay. I’ve heard enough. Now tell me what _actually_ happened. I didn’t ask for a children’s bedtime story.’

‘What kind of bedtime stories did you get?’ Gaia frowned.

‘Not the point. Cut the bullshit and tell me what happened after I fell.’

‘I just told you.’

‘No, you told me a fairy tale.’

Gaia tilted her head to the side, fingers still tapping against the table. Her gaze drilled into his, lips pressed tight and muscles tight as she kept quiet. 

There were times when she glowed, almost. Times when her white hair seemed ethereal and the proper posture of her pushed-back shoulders and chin held high made her look otherworldly. She was no less of a soldier than he was, but he didn’t know whose orders she was following. 

It was times like these that Bellamy’s refusal to believe in anything other than what he had been proven with his own two eyes, wavered. 

Eerie discomfort washed over him. He felt seen, and not in a way he liked. 

‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ he asked. ‘I asked for answers.’

Gaia let out a defeated sigh. Her body relaxed into the chair and she took a bite out of the fox leg, her gaze softening. ‘You fell. You were dead, or you should’ve been, according to all medical knowledge I had, but you held on long enough for me to get you here and patch you up. I fed you, I gave you medicine and drinks, and I made sure you made it out alive.’

‘That’s what I was asking,’ Bellamy said, then mentally scolded himself. Awkwardly, he added, ‘Thanks.’

‘I couldn’t fix everything.’

‘What?

She motioned to his legs. ‘Your ankle is an old injury. I couldn’t fix that. Your back is… Well, I guess you’ll figure it out on your own.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ll see for yourself.’ Her tone was sharp and full of edge. ‘Eventually.’

The conversation was over. Bellamy knew better than to keep it going; Gaia seemed to be reluctant to even tell him as much as she did. 

His dreams are empty. It feels as if she should be here, but she isn’t, not anymore. 

Part of him feels betrayed; abandoned.

Is she away because she wants to be, or because he feels too hurt for her to be around?

No answer comes, even when he asks the question into the emptiness: 

Has he not suffered enough?

Another month or so had gone by, until Bellamy’s body returned to a normal, healthy state. He’d started doing push ups, pull ups, and any exercise Gaia would allow about two weeks earlier, and it made a massive change to the structure of his body. It was difficult, at first, but his body recognised the efforts he’d used to make every day for as long as he could remember, and in combination with Gaia’s incredibly healthy diet, he’d managed to become a self-sustaining functional human being again. 

He went hunting with her, several times, and she taught him how to lure and prepare desert animals. She taught him how to cook with the heat from the sun only, and how to use the weeds and herbs they’d come across in an oasis near her house. She taught him how to find clay and how to use it, how to scout for water, how to light a fire with a piece of glass. She taught him how to shelter himself from danger while asleep, and how to build a house like hers; a house buried under pounds of sand, invisible to an eye not akin to its presence. It was a long process, one Bellamy didn’t think he’d ever need in practice, but she insisted on teaching him. 

When he’d complained for the first and last time, she said to him, ‘I’m not letting you go unless I’ve made sure saving you wasn’t a waste of my time.’

So he stayed, made a point of learning as quickly and as intensely as he could. 

He’d tried asking for more details on how she saved him, but Gaia refused to tell him anything more. ‘The details,’ she’d told him, ‘are irrelevant. All that should matter to you is that you were dead and now you’re alive. If I were you, I’d think twice before questioning it.’ So he thought twice, and thrice, and as many times as he had until he concluded that there was no point in trying to pry answers from her. She was as stubborn as he was, only she didn’t have a home that she needed to come to – as far as he knew, at least. 

As far as he knew, he knew nothing about Gaia, and she preferred to keep it that way. Bellamy did, too. 

He missed his family. According to Gaia, it would take him at least about two weeks to get to Arkadia’s capital, and that was if all the conditions were perfect. There were rumours of scoundrels and thieves gathering around the Red Desert, in Eden’s Pass right at the border of Arkadia. It was highly likely Bellamy would run into trouble on the way. 

‘I’d say a month, give or take, based on the current conditions,’ she said, after a minute of consideration. ‘Especially considering your conditions, too.’

Now, all these memories of his time with her were flashing in his mind as he found himself five miles north from Gaia’s home. There was a rucksack on his back, strapped to him tight enough so he could run with it. Inside it was a jug of water, a few days’ worth of food that he’d just caught, and some clothing in case of a sandstorm. In short: it was everything he would need to survive on his own. 

The sun was setting. Within hours, the desert would get cold in a way the Tower never had, despite being placed inside it. He’d need to lay down with the sandstorm clothes over him, place incense around him so it would keep the natural predators of the territory at bay. He could easily head southwest, where Arkadia was situated, without ever seeing Gaia again. Or more precisely, without giving Gaia a chance to prevent him from leaving.

‘C’mon, Bellamy,’ he said to himself. ‘Just do it.’

He didn’t have a lot of time to make a decision. If he wanted a head start, he needed to get going, fast. If he wanted to go back, then the situation wasn’t as urgent, and he could use the daylight to hunt some more, get some berries for the oasis two miles further north, and come back in time. 

Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howled. Bellamy took out the dagger Gaia had given him. 

The first time, he thought it was Roan’s – they looked almost identical. About the size from the beginning of his palm to the tip of his middle finger, three fingers wide, with an ivory handle and a crimson ribbon wrapped around where the blade connected with the handle. 

It wasn’t Roan’s, because Roan’s ribbon was a night blue. 

Gaia said it was a dagger from an Azgeda warrior who’d tried to kill her a few years earlier, when she unknowingly crossed the boundary between the Red Desert and Azgeda territory. She didn’t ask why Bellamy gasped at the sight of it, and Bellamy appreciated that.

Now, he was prepared to use it the way Roan had told him it was used best. It was made from the same brass material as a double-edged sword, and the pendant hanging around his neck. 

The coyote appeared from one of the dunes, its front legs outstretched and head hung low, bracing for the attack. It jumped, and Bellamy ducked, raised the dagger, and sliced the animal’s stomach open. 

Blood poured over him. His hair stuck to his face and he felt the metallic smell in his mouth as he breathed in, and looked at the coyote to make sure he’d finished the job. It didn’t suffer. 

Bellamy sighed. ‘To hell with it.’

He ended up cutting it up right there and then, getting his hands dirty in blood and guts. It reeked; this was the part he could never get used to. It was disgusting and it made him feel sick, and he retched when the smell became too intense. On this heat, the meat was starting to deteriorate fast, and the smells only kept getting stronger, so Bellamy worked faster. Whatever was salvageable—which wasn’t much, because desert coyotes don’t eat much—he put it in a special bag Gaia had given him. 

Vultures, raven, and crows had already begun to gather around him, cawing as they did. They flew in circles around him, some even landing and attempting to get their own share before he was finished with slicing up the good parts. 

A crow pinched his arm. Bellamy pushed it away; if it was anything other than a crow, he wouldn’t have been as gentle. 

‘Go away,’ he said to the crow. ‘There’s nothing for you here.’

It pinched, again, and he pushed it, again. 

‘Scoot. You’ll get your share once I’m finished.’

It watched him, silently, as if it understood what he’d said. Bellamy wiped sweat off his forehead and went back to slicing up the coyote, because his mind was starting to go to weird places. 

He found himself having to remember that not every crow is his friend. If he wanted to get to his friend, there were things he needed done, and thinking about crows wasn’t the way to do it. 

A raven attempted to do the same thing as the crow. Bellamy swatted it away and it let out a “kraa” that was, somehow, highly insulted. 

‘Get it together, you old man.’ Bellamy grunted as he sliced through the very last bit he planned on taking. ‘They’re just birds.’

In the end, as soon as he’d walked five feet away, the birds rushed to their meals. He watched, for a bit, but had to look away; they were devouring the animal as if they had never eaten before. It was messy and it was repulsive, and he thought if he were good with words, he would’ve written about the sight. 

Something about it felt important. 

It was only when Bellamy was on his way to Gaia’s, his steps heavy and the rucksack reeking of raw meat, that he realised why dealing with the ravenous birds had helped him make his choice, and he realised why the whole thing felt significant. 

If it wasn’t for Gaia, that would’ve been him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you enjoyed this chapter! gaia and bellamy's dynamic was amazing to write. is this the last we see of gaia? what were the things she mentioned in her story? why does she _not stop preaching?_  
>  as i said earlier, let me know your thoughts/questions/theories below, i am always curious to hear those!


	3. mirror's image

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bellamy finally sets out for Arkadia, except nothing goes the way it's supposed to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a long one today! it's a bit slower in the first half, but trust me, the second half is worth the wait. there's also a lot of introspection of bellamy's character, which was super fun to write. bit of gore by the end of first half, but within show limits. there's a surprise appearance by one of my favourite characters!
> 
> (might have some typos. i apologise in advance - i have been too busy to proofread before posting, but considering i've reread the chapter about five times before, should be bearable.)

‘Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne/ He travels the fastest who travels alone.’ — _The Story of the Gadsbys,_ Rudyard Kipling

three: mirror's image

Gaia declared Bellamy fit to leave three days after he’d come back from the coyote hunt. It was morning, even before the sun had risen, and she woke him with a firm voice and a sturdy posture, ready to go to war. Instead of a greeting, she said, ‘You’re leaving today.’ If there were any words Bellamy could’ve said, the shock swallowed them all. 

The next hour or so was spent preparing Bellamy for his journey home. It was all the little tips Gaia hadn’t already given him, paired with lessons on the lands he was about to enter. It was rushed, so he could set out with the first light, or maybe it felt rushed because Bellamy’s head was spinning from absorbing all of the information. He paid attention, he listened, and he tried to compartmentalise the information in different parts of his brain as well as possible. He visualised what he could, imagined what he couldn’t. 

He expected to leave, but once the time came, the idea of freedom was almost too much to bear.

The moment everything was packed in the huge rucksack Gaia had given him, a strange feeling of peace settled between them. Quiet, too. 

Bellamy’s eyes found Gaia’s. They were almost the same shade of dark brown as his, and for the first time, Bellamy could tell how young she looked. Beneath all her bravado and wisdom, she was still just a girl. 

‘Thank you.’ His words were quiet, only for her to hear. 

She’d spent the last seven, almost eight months looking after him. He owed her a lot more than just his life; a sincere thank you was the least he could give her.

Gaia nodded. ‘Stay alive, Bellamy. Don’t let my efforts be for nothing.’

‘I’ll try,’ he said. ‘No promises.’

The conversation seemed to end there and then, the way all conversations with Gaia did. Bellamy stood up from his crouching position and brought the rucksack with him, swaying a strap over his right shoulder until it hung on his back. He hooked his other arm through the left strap and tied the horizontal four around his torso, in two knots. There was a map in the left side pocket and a jug of water in the right. 

It was time for him to go. 

Gaia followed him until the wooden door. He was ready to go, fully equipped, but his heart was… 

He was scared. He was scared of all the time he’d lost before the Tower, in the Tower, with Gaia; he was scared that he maybe wasn’t ready enough, that his body would be unable to sustain him, that he’d lose his life the moment he faced danger; he was scared he wasn’t strong enough to get back home. 

He was scared that home wasn’t going to be home anymore. 

‘It’s going to be alright,’ Gaia said, behind him. ‘It’s okay to be scared.’

‘I’m not scared.’

‘Bellamy.’

It took a lot for him to look at her, to let her see the inner turmoil his face was clearly showing. Her confidence in him didn’t waver – not now, not any of the times before. She understood him better than he understood himself, and it terrified him. 

She placed her hands on his shoulders, steadying him, grounding him. ‘Bellamy, being afraid is what keeps you alive. It makes you cautious and wary, and it’s what will help you get back home. There is no shame in being scared. It means you are aware of what could happen. Fear’s only a problem if you let it stop you.’

Bellamy didn’t know what to say. 

Gaia patted his shoulders and took a step back. ‘Once you’ve seen your family, find Wanheda.’

‘Wanheda?’

‘The Commander of Death.’

‘I told you to stop with the—’

‘That wasn’t a fairy tale, Bellamy.’ Gaia paused and stepped closer, far too deep into his personal space, until he could almost feel her breath on his face. ‘If you want to save your people, you have to find Wanheda.’

Bellamy took a step closer to the exit. ‘I am thankful for everything you’ve done for me, but I get to decide what I do with my life.’

‘Gods don’t give second chances for just living.’

‘Well, they left me to rot before that,’ Bellamy spanned back. ‘If they wanted me to do shit for them, they shouldn’t have let me go through hell and back for it.’

‘You just don’t understand—’

‘No, you’re right, I don’t. Because I don’t  _ want  _ to understand.’

Gaia’s lower lip trembled and the skin on her neck tightened. Her eyes were drilling into his, again, and he realised this was the first time he had ever seen her lose her cool. But then her shoulders relaxed and her eyes softened, just the way they did the day she started with the tales, and he thought he was out of the fire. 

‘If this ends badly, you’ll only have yourself to blame.’

Bellamy clenched his teeth. ‘Thanks.’

Gaia regarded him with a stony expression, any thoughts and feeling barricaded beneath it. When she finally spoke, her voice was the slightest bit softer, a little more like a girl and less like...whatever she was. 

‘May we meet again,’ she said.

All Bellamy did was give her a curt nod, and echoed her words.

If the conversation had ended on a lighter note, he thought he would’ve said a proper goodbye. This way, he was just eager to get away from her, and only slowed his pace to a regular one when her place was out of sight. If he believed in Gaia’s gods, maybe he would’ve considered her words – now, they were just a fairy tale. 

Medicine saved him. Luck. Chance.  _ Whatever.  _ But not gods. 

Even if gods existed, they wouldn’t think twice about men like him.

About half a mile northwest from Gaia’s home, Bellamy came to a halt. The sun was steady in its rise and could provide just enough light for him to look at the compass with the map Gaia had given him. He’d been walking about fifteen degrees too far towards the west, but for the short distance he’d walked, it wasn’t detrimental. Once he corrected his course, he’d still have weeks’ worth of walking. It was about fifty miles going straight south to Eden’s Pass and that would mean he’d be out of the desert, for good. The point where he’d enter was too south to continue straight to Arkadia, so he would need to go north, through Eden’s Pass for about another forty-five miles, and then he’d be at the border of Arkadia. Beyond that, he’d need to evade the sea, so the fifty miles straight to the capital came equal to almost eighty with the diversion. And then another fifteen unless he wanted to go through the capital – Bellamy concluded that was a decision for once he was far within Arkadia. 

Sitting down on the sand, he sighed; this was going to be a lot more difficult than he had anticipated. Not only was the sun already starting to nip at his skin, but there was a wind that could easily lead to a sandstorm – and Gaia had warned him about worms that love the taste of human flesh. To top it all off, these were just some of many challenges the Red Desert would present him with for the next fifty miles. He figured it would take him about three days’ worth of walking in this heat, because the map showed an oasis that was almost on his way to Eden’s Pass, and he was going to need to stock up on water.

This was giving him a headache. 

He didn’t feel prepared, or ready. He didn’t feel like he was doing the right thing. He didn’t know if he was going to make it home alive. 

Bellamy got back on his feet and put the things back into the rucksack.

‘Fear’s only a problem if you let it stop you,’ he reminded himself. 

A journey was ahead of him. 

__

He is falling. He feels the sun devour him, take his skin apart inch by inch. His wings are aflame. 

He is but a falling star, burnt to dust by the time his body touches the ground.

The birds are hungry and he is a feast. 

Bellamy didn’t sleep well. He hadn’t slept well since he’d set off for Arkadia, with the nightmares getting worse each time. There wasn’t one that didn’t make him retching, or gasping for air, hands reaching for his face to make sure his skin hadn’t been burned off. 

It took a lot of energy to remind himself he was still alive. 

As he prepared to leave the last oasis in the desert before Eden’s Pass, he found his thoughts going back to Gaia’s fairy tale version of his accident. She got the overall story right, or at least from what he could remember, but the way she’d worded it made him uneasy. The idea of birds helping him, him dying scorched as he fell, gods reviving him, and whatever the hell was going on with his back… It was all too much. 

He cursed her for being religious and for thinking that everything needed to have a higher meaning. All it did was make him uneasy and paranoid, and he’d had enough on his plate even without her preachings. 

Bellamy gathered his supplies, picked up his makeshift bed from the grass and put it all back into the rucksack. He checked the compass, looked around to ensure he was about to head in the right direction, then put it away, too. 

The oasis was smaller than any he’d seen before. The trees were few and far in-between, but he’d managed to find two close enough to stick a hammock between, for the night. Whatever little shade they produced, it wasn’t enough to make him want to stay, like the previous oasis did. He took some time to wash himself, bathe in the modest lake that had gotten warm quickly, and filled up three jugs’ worth of water. Right next to the lake, there were wild desert bushes with berries that he thought were called jobi nuts and gave him hallucinations, but they also made for great sleep enhancements. 

If this was the last oasis he’d need to see for the rest of his life, he’d be alright with that. 

Bellamy left the place and the day wore on. It shouldn’t have taken him four full days and counting of walking to get to Eden’s Pass, but he’d underestimated how mundane and demotivating the desert can be. Every step was the same – the monotony was killing him faster than the environmental conditions. 

Sometimes, he thought he could hear the same song playing, and he’d try to walk faster, more eagerly, except it would never get louder. He understood that it was simply his mind playing tricks on him, eager for anything that would get him to a better place, but it felt good to be hopeful. 

Bellamy reached for the pendant in his pocket. His fingers tapped it, lightly, just to make sure it was still there. 

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’m listening. Just bring me home.’

Gaia had her gods. Bellamy had his girl in the locket. 

With a hand wrapped around the locket and the memory of the water vivid in his mind, Bellamy’s feet fell back into the rhythm of survival. It was a pace that was a little faster than walking, a little slower than fast walking; a pace where his heart rate remained at a constant and he didn’t tire more than the environment made him. 

His eyes glanced up to the sun and he shielded them with a hand; it was starting to leave its highest point. It would fall on his right, if he kept his direction straight.

The sand was the worst part of his journey, in Bellamy’s opinion. Gaia had warned him that the monotony could take a toll on him. So far, he was grateful that he hadn’t experienced dehydration or hallucinations; if he had fallen into delirium, his survival would’ve been even more compromised. 

He just needed to get out of the desert. From then on, it was supposed to be easier on the mind. 

Ahead of him, sand. At his sides, sand. The oasis had been long behind him, almost forgotten, and sand covered every inch of land Bellamy could see. For all he knew, he could be walking in the same spot for hours and he would be none the wiser. 

There was sand in his hair, too. He felt it on his lips, even through the linen scarf Gaia had given him. Every now and then a soft wind would blow a granule or two into his eyes and he had to blink them out, stopping as he did so. Sometimes, the sand would shift underneath his feet and he’d almost fall down a dune; sometimes, he wished he would. 

He gripped the pendant and reminded himself of why he was doing this. 

In the distance, a coyote howled. It only made him walk faster. 

The first flash of green came merely minutes later and Bellamy nearly tripped over his own feet when he saw it; it could’ve been a phantasm, or a mirage, or  _ anything but real,  _ but he let himself believe it was real. If that was what it took to keep him going. 

The coyote howled again; Bellamy ran faster. 

Head held high, he missed the ground. His feet slipped. The sand welcomed his body and he slid down a dune, barely managing to hold the scarf to his mouth. He rolled over and over and over and it was hurting a lot more than he thought it would. It was hot, as well, and whenever his skin touched the sand he felt as if he were on fire. 

It ended as soon as he began. His body hit the lowest point of the sand and he got up, looking around. The green was out of sight and he’d lost his orientation for a second. 

Bellamy closed his eyes. He brushed the sand off his face and hair, checked that the contents of the rucksack hadn’t been damaged in the fall, and turned himself back to the right direction. 

Wherever the coyote was, it sounded almost as if it were following him. 

Bellamy was too pissed off to be someone’s meal tonight.

In front of him, there was water. It was a lake; bigger than any he’d seen at the oasis, stretching to the sides almost as far as his eyes could see. Across it, about five hundred yards, he could see a dock, or a pier, and buildings stacked up behind it. The heat radiating off the sand made everything look as if it were melting. Still, he could clearly tell apart the monitoring shack that was built right by the dock, all wooden and in various stages of repair and decay. He didn’t see, but he knew there was a boat house behind it, where he’d left his own,  _ AUGUSTUS  _ written over its emerald sides. 

Sheer willpower propelled him forward. His legs were slipping and he was becoming exhausted, but all he could hear was the beat of his feet across the sand matching the beat of his heart; the water called to him like it always had, singing to him, luring him in. 

All he could think about was who’d be waiting for him at the other end of the lake; would it be Raven, with her trademark ponytail? Murphy, flying over him as he did the night they met? Octavia, unmoving until his head would burst through the surface? Miller, grinning at him with a blade between his teeth? Even Finn, or Kane, or Sterling? Any of his people?

A crow flew above his head, cawing as it did. The bent of its wings, the fearlessness as it steered towards the lake, the snarky tilt of its beak – it was all the same as the crow that was waiting for him back home.

Bellamy ran. He needed to get back, to his people. 

The sun was high in the sky, and he thought that might be why the lake didn’t seem to be getting any closer. 

He should’ve known – but he didn’t. 

It was easier to believe home was just an arm’s reach away. 

Bellamy ran and ran and ran and the lake ran away from him, too. The san was closing in on him, the heat seemed to be coming from his insides, too, and the blood pressure in his ears was deafening. 

If he just kept running, he’d get there. He’d hug Octavia again. Train with Murphy. Hear Raven’s snarky remarks. 

All he had to do was keep—

A swift blow came to Bellamy’s side. He lost his footing and hit the ground, hard. The dagger was out of its sheath and he raised it; the animal groaned in his face. 

Bellamy lay on the sand, unmoving. His eyes were trained on the coyote, arm at the ready. 

The coyote lunged. 

Bellamy rolled to his side and into a crouching position, just as the animal swung its paw towards his face. He evaded it, and the blow that followed. He threw his body forward and stuck the dagger to the side. 

The sound of the skin tearing was deafening. Bellamy held his knees bent and weight on the toes, dagger in front of his chest, directed towards the animal. 

‘Come on,’ he grunted. 

The coyote looked almost exactly the same as the one he’d killed days before. He could see how feral it was, how hungry it was, and he waited. 

When the coyote lunged, Bellamy raised the dagger and it pierced the animal’s jaw. Its paws still scratched at his face; Bellamy twisted the blade and sliced away from himself. The animal winced, scratched his face one last time, and fell limp in his arms. 

Bellamy had been bathed in blood. 

All that passed his mouth was a tired sigh; then he got to work.

Some time later, the coyote meat had neatly been stowed away inside the rucksack. Gaia had given him enough food to last him another week, if he was rationing, but if there was space, Bellamy was going to fill it up with more food. He got lucky; there was no way to tell when he’d get lucky again. 

Ahead of him, there was nothing. 

Somewhere down, he’d known that the lake couldn’t have been real. His friends were hundreds of miles away and the only way he was going to see them was by not letting himself be fooled into every fantasy that offered itself to him. 

He had gotten soft. It was time to harden again. 

In his mind, he heard Roan making fun of him, and he decided that he was going to finish his journey for him. He was going home, because Roan couldn’t. 

Only minutes later, the first speck of green rose over one of the faraway dunes. Bellamy’s heart raced at the sight; it could’ve been just an oasis, but according to Gaia’s map, that was roughly where Eden’s Pass was supposed to begin. 

The dune he was walking on lowered and the speck disappeared. Bellamy kept walking in that direction; the sun was starting to go low and the day was starting to get cold. He didn’t think it would be long until he reached the end of the desert. 

As he kept moving, he realised that adrenaline wasn’t the only reason why his body was unusually alert; he had a wound at his side, where the coyote had sunk its teeth. His fingers struggled to pull up the fabric covering it, as it was soaked with both his blood and the coyotes, and it stuck to the wound and the skin around it. He hissed through gritted teeth. It was big and starting to bruise already, but it seemed that the blow had missed anything vital. It wasn’t too deep, either. 

Bellamy took out a jug out of the rucksack’s side, cursing his fate for making him lose water, then spilled it over the wound. It was burning, but he patted at it with the cleanest part of the fabric, until most of the blood had been washed away and he could properly assess the damage. 

It looked nasty. It hurt like a bitch. 

But he was going to be okay. 

The glass shard Gaia had given him was small, but he reckoned it would be useful enough. The sun provided enough light and heat to bring the brass blade to a satisfying heat. 

When Bellamy pressed it against his side, he allowed himself to let out an agonising scream. 

Who was there to hear him, anyway?

After that, all he could think about was just sitting down and settling somewhere for the night. His ankle throbbed, his legs ached, the pain in his back hadn’t relented, the wound and the skin around it felt as if they were on fire, and Bellamy was  _ tired.  _

When the green appeared again, it didn’t go away. It increased in size until Bellamy could see the highest point of more than one tree, much fuller and bigger than the ones in the oases. It was a forest, he was soon able to tell, spanning from one side to another as far as he could see – just like the lake had been. It was big and welcoming, a heaven when compared to the Red Desert. 

Bellamy felt the change in the air. It wasn’t as heavy, as dense, and the oxygen coming from the trees began to fill his lungs like medicine. His muscles felt energised and his pace increased. The idea that he would be in a forest, surrounded by trees and grass and bushes and mushrooms and insects—

It was as if he were suddenly reminded of why he left Gaia’s in the first place. 

Twenty minutes later, Bellamy’s feet stepped on moss for the first time, for the first time in almost two years. The deeper into the forest he went, he was welcomed by the shade of the trees, by the fresh air, the softness beneath his steps, the sounds of buzzing and chirping and cricketing, birds that didn’t feed on flesh were flying high above his head; Bellamy felt at home. 

He let out a shaky breath as he turned his back on all of this, looking out to the Red Desert that he’d left behind. It was never ending; it was miles of sand assorted into dunes, the gold colour of it now a bad taste in Bellamy’s mouth. 

‘Goodbye,’ he said to it. In his mind, he added:  _ Forever. _

Somewhere in there, was Roan; somewhere in there, was Gaia. There was nothing Bellamy could do for either.

Instead, he turned around, and edged deeper into the forest. 

There are birds flying above him; it’s doves and seagulls and swallows, and they’re flying around the lake as the sun sets behind his back. 

He is holding breadcrumbs in the palm of his hand, letting some of it slip through his fingers every now and then. A trail of overly-friendly ducks is following him, and he laughs as he climbs into his boat. 

The ducks enter the water. They follow him through the lake, too, until they are in the very middle of it; the ducks in a circle and him in the centre. 

He watches the sun set behind the rooftops of his hometown. 

He is home.

In the morning, Bellamy didn’t open his eyes the instant he woke up. He let his other senses take over instead, relishing in the fact that he’d left the desert after nearly two long years. His nose was filled with pollen and it made him sneeze, more than once, but it made him smile, too. Some of the plants and berries he’d touched on the way here had stained his fingers, which stained his face afterwards, and he smelled like fresh strawberries. Somewhere nearby, birds had awoken, too, happily chirping the morning away. The grass underneath him was buzzing with ants and ladybirds and when one of them climbed on his arm, he didn’t push it away immediately. 

He listened to the forest waking up. It was a beautiful sound. 

Bellamy pushed himself into a half sitting position and it was almost instant regret; the wound at the right side of his waist was pulsating. He lifted his shirt and he could see that the flesh he’d tried sanitising looked awfully red, littered with the faintest traces of yellow forming underneath the scorched layer of his skin. It stung upon touch. 

There was no time to dwell on this. If Gaia was right and Eden’s Pass really was full of scoundrels, he couldn’t let the injury be a nuisance. 

It took him about twenty or so minutes to find the nearest creek. He heard it even before he’d gone to sleep, but the creek was a source of water and he was much more likely to be attacked there than anywhere else. Now, he made his way through the low bushes and followed the sound of running water – another of the things he hadn’t heard in ages. 

The creek itself was small and thin, too small for him to bathe in, but good enough for what he needed from it. 

Bellamy observed the area around him. Trees, bushes, and grass were all that he could see. The creek was a few feet ahead of him, some rocks and pebbles scattered around it, but he couldn’t spot anything alive. Save for the sounds of nature, the place was empty. 

_ Safe enough, I suppose.  _

He left the rucksack at the side of the creek, within an arm’s reach. His shirt came off and he dipped it into the creek, until the blood began to wash off with the water. It was much colder than he’d anticipated, he kept rubbing the fabric until it was as clean as it would get. 

When he pressed it to his wound, he gasped. He patted around it, lightly, until all of it was washed clean. Gaia hadn’t given him any remedies for injuries like these, and it did make him a little angry, except he knew that he was probably being ungrateful. 

He wished he had a needle and a thread. It would be his first time stitching himself, but it still would’ve been better than simply having to put a hot blade on it. 

Once the wound had been as sterilised as it could get, he placed five rocks in an X formation and placed the shirt over it. 

He filled up the jugs and started drinking; he couldn’t remember the time fresh, cold water tasted better. 

For a few minutes, Bellamy let himself relax, even if it was dangerous. He sat at the creek, listening to the nature that he couldn’t get enough of. With every step, he was closer to getting home, to seeing his family’s faces again; to sitting in his boat and watching the sun set over his home, finally at peace.

He’d been trying to visualise this moment even when it was merely a fantasy. The colours were the first to fade; he couldn’t remember the shade of Octavia’s eyes, or Raven’s skin, or Murphy’s hair. Over time, the lines and shapes of his friends’ faces became blurry, unclear, and the expressions he’d seen them make every day for years were gone, almost as if they’d never existed. He couldn’t recall Raven’s lips on his, the feeling of Octavia’s hair on his fingertips as he braided it, Murphy’s fist on his cheek when they’d trained. 

Bit by bit, he’d been losing them for way too long. 

In the creek, he could see a face that he hardly recognised, too. Gaia told him that when she had found him, he had no hair on his body. Since then, his hair had grown back, thick and full, with soft curls beginning to form at the very top. His beard was starting to fill in, too, hiding his jawline. He couldn't see his freckles in the running water but he knew they were there. 

He looked older. More experienced. More frightening. More tired. Just...more. He looked like he was more than he had been. 

Bellamy wondered if that was true. His body was different than before the Tower, too – he had lost any fat he’d had before and some of the muscles hadn’t fully returned in the time spent at Gaia’s, so he looked a lot smaller than he thought he would. His face no longer contained any baby fat that it took him well over twenty years to get rid of, and it was all a consequence of what had happened to him. 

No; Bellamy recognised this person just as little as he could recognise the people in his memories. He knew who it was supposed to be, but his eyes couldn’t believe it. 

What made him chuckle was the fact that if what Gaia had told him was true, about how he’d fallen, then his skin would show marks of it. He could tell that he was going to have a big scar from where he’d tried to sanitise his wound, and that was half as bad as it could’ve been. If he’d really set on fire, body scorched, then his skin would be nowhere as smooth as this. 

It was a little dry, a little itchy and ashy from low levels of hydration, but that was all. It was actually better than he remembered, as much as he could. Gaia should’ve saved her tales for those who believed in them.

In that moment, the ripples in the water mirrored a figure walking up behind him. Before he could turn around, they whacked him on the head. 

Bellamy was out before his head hit the ground.

He comes home, but his home is the Tower. 

He belongs there.

Voices he didn’t recognise woke him up. It was clear they were arguing, even if in hushed tones, and it ended abruptly; heavy footsteps became more distant, until he could no longer hear them.

Bellamy assessed the situation. He was lying on cold, hard ground and the air smelled of lack of filtration and dust. His hands were tied behind his back, pressed against the ground. Someone had put the shirt back on him – he could still feel it being wet. His wound still ached, only the pulsation had become duller and less prominent. It itched less, too. Something about it was off. The back of his head, where he’d gotten the blow, was pulsating a little more and he could feel the headache like a band around his head.

He should’ve been more fucking careful. 

Fire cracked in his near proximity. Bellamy opened his eyes. 

He was in a cave, a modestly sized one that didn’t have enough space for living, so it couldn’t have been someone’s home. The fire that was cracking was in the very middle of it and through the flames, he could just barely make out the silhouette of a person. To their side, in Bellamy’s line of sight, was his rucksack – thrown on the ground with some of the contents spilling out, either having fallen out or rummaged out. 

He had a bad feeling it was the second. 

Still, his fingers reached in the back pocket of his trousers, and found the pendant. He pulled it open and began working on the ropes around his wrists. 

‘Pretty careless for an Azgeda.’ The voice belonged to a young woman, and its owner stood up from behind the fire and walked over to him. ‘Should be embarrassed.’

‘I’m not Azgeda.’

‘Beats me,’ she said. ‘Then why do you have an Azgeda dagger?’

‘A gift.’

‘Azgeda don’t just  _ give  _ their daggers.’

‘They do, if you press them hard enough.’

The girl was quiet for a second, then grinned. ‘Ballsy.’

Bellamy didn’t respond.

Her face was framed by long dark hair that reminded him a little too much of Octavia; even in the way she held herself, confident and self-assured. There was a tattoo on the left side of her face, an uneven line that followed the roundness of her eye over the nose, drawn from over her eyebrow to just below her cheekbone. Her clothing was very similar to Bellamy’s – desert clothing. Light layers of sand-coloured fabric, except she had gloves, too, and her boots looked a lot more sand-proof than the ones of his feet. 

She wasn’t Azgeda. They didn’t do tattoos – they did facial scarring, instead.

‘What are you planning to do with me?’

‘Nothing.’ She walked over to him, then crouched. ‘We just wanted some of your things.’

‘I need them,’ Bellamy said.

‘Tough luck.’

His hands worked with the ropes as he kept his body still enough she wouldn’t notice. It was a skill he’d been taught when he was younger and had saved his life multiple times already. With a bit of luck, it would do it again. 

Bellamy located his dagger; it was strapped to her thigh. 

‘Why didn’t you just leave me at the creek? Instead of dragging me all the way here.’

‘Risk,’ she explained. ‘If you were left there, you could’ve been found. They’d know it wasn’t just you in the area, and we couldn’t have that.’

‘I’m still your problem.’

‘Not a big one. We’ll just walk you out, now that you’re awake. Relax, for now, get some rest while you can. You’re safer here than sleeping outside, and there’s still a couple of hours until my brother gets back and we get rid of you.’

‘I don’t need to relax,’ Bellamy said. It was getting more difficult to keep his voice and breath steady; the ropes were taking longer than they should’ve. ‘Just let me go now.’

The girl chuckled. ‘If you’re going to be running, you need to rest so that nasty wound you’ve got heals as much as it can.’

‘Why would I be running?’

‘The Reapers come out at night,’ she said, ‘and they like their food alive.’

_ Gaia didn’t mention any Reapers. _ ‘Well, whoever those guys are, I’m sure I can deal with them.’

The girl chuckled, but there was no humour to it – maybe a little bit of amusement. ‘Look, you obviously have no clue what you’re dealing with.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘Hm. I wish I could help you, but I just can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t want to.’

A long time had passed since the last time Bellamy had been on the receiving end of taunts like these – usually he was at Murphy’s side when he was giving them, and he was awfully good at them. 

He gritted his teeth. The realisation of how low he’d fallen irked his self-control, and he was losing it a little. 

The rope finally snapped, quietly. The girl straightened her knees and turned her back on him. 

Bellamy attacked without a second thought. 

He lunged forward, angling his hand so he got the dagger out before she’d even realised he was free. He kicked her in the knees and she stumbled forward; he took a step forward and had the dagger to her neck in no time. Her hands were on his, and she tried pushing it away, until Bellamy pressed the blade against her skin, just tight enough to make her feel it. 

She grunted; but she was relentless. She stomped on his foot and Bellamy let go of her. Her hands whipped him across his chest and pushed him back. His legs stumbled over his rucksack, contents spilling out. 

Her hands were raised. She swung at him, missed, and Bellamy ducked. 

There was his rope on the ground. Bellamy hooked her calf with his foot and she fell. He grabbed the rope and pressed her against the ground, foot on her stomach, and grabbed her hands. 

She kicked him in the back – right where it hurt. Bellamy grunted and lost his balance and she got to her feet, but he pushed her against the wall, turned her and caught hold of her wrists before she could do anything else. 

He was quick at tying the rope. 

She stomped on his foot, but Bellamy had seen it coming, and moved his foot out of the way. He tightened the knot and pressed her against the wall, turned her around, hands threatening to tug on the rope even more, and a dagger pressed against her throat.

Bellamy had her in his grip. 

‘What do you want?’ she grunted, gasping for air in between each word. 

‘My stuff,’ panted Bellamy, ‘and some answers. I don’t want to hurt you.’

‘Okay, look, we didn’t mean to hurt you, either. We just didn’t know if you were dangerous. The plan was to take some of your things and leave you at the creek, but I saw your wound and – and I felt bad about leaving you to fend for yourself.’

The rope around her wrists tightened and she whimpered. He kept the dagger on her neck, and looked at her; her lips were trembling and she looked fearful at last. 

‘You were going to leave me to die.’

‘No,’ she protested. ‘If you weren’t injured, you would’ve been fine.’

Bellamy pressed a little harder. ‘Why did you tie me up? What did you do to me?’

‘I just— It’s medicine. I put medicine on you.’

‘Why tie me up, then?’

‘We didn’t know if you were going to try to kill us!’

Her eyes were wide open and he saw the hint of anger in them, too. He knew what she wasn’t saying – the way he was acting right now was what they had been trying to prevent. 

His eyes flickered between hers, and he released some of the pressure on her neck. She took in a big and loud breath, but her alertness was unwavering, and her hands were still pressed together by his rope. 

‘I don’t want to have you hurt you,’ he said, slowly. ‘Tell me what you did with my things and I’ll go.’

‘It’s— It’s all still in there.’ She glanced at the rucksack, and so did Bellamy; he couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth. ‘We were going to go through it in the morning. Look, I just tried to help you. We weren’t going to take anything you didn’t need to survive.’

‘That doesn’t make you any less of a thief.’

‘I gave you medicine. Look at your wound, okay?’

Cautiously, Bellamy took a step away from her and let his hand fall from her neck. To ensure she wouldn’t make any moves, he tugged on the rope around her wrists and her face tensed, and shoulders relaxed. 

Bellamy lifted the hem of his shirt. 

There was a muddy-looking paste on it, light green in colour. It seemed a little less red and blotchy than it had been when he was at the creek, and it certainly didn’t hurt or itch as much. 

‘You did this?’ When all she gave in response, he asked, ‘Why?’

‘It was the least I could do,’ she said, ‘if we were going to take your food.’

Bellamy sighed. 

This was the kind of situation where having Raven helped a great deal. She was the no-bullshit type even more so than any of them were, and she was able to see through a liar’s teeth in no time. Bellamy couldn’t tell if this girl was lying to him to save her skin. He tried coming up with a reason why she’d do something like that for him, but he just couldn’t. 

No part of him could believe that she was just being nice, and her doing this in return for his food was something he could buy. It wasn’t that far-fetched. 

He sighed. ‘What is the paste supposed to do?’

‘There was inflammation around the flesh. Whatever you tried to do to sanitise it, it didn’t work properly. I put yarrow over it. It reduces the inflammation and helps prevent an infection.’

‘You used your medicine on me?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice had grown steadier and her lips had stopped quivering; she was growing less and less afraid of him. ‘It’s not a big deal. There’s a lot of yarrow in Eden’s Pass. If I hadn’t done it, it would’ve gotten fully infected.’

‘Are you saying you saved my life?’

‘I don’t know,’ she answered honestly. ‘Probably, yeah.’

Bellamy sighed again. He only let himself one moment of reconsidering his decision before he tucked the knife into the sheath strapped to his belt and let go of the rope. He stepped back, raised his arms to show they were empty, and gulped. 

‘I think we got off on the wrong foot.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i spent way too long looking up medicines for this chapter than i should've asdfghjkl
> 
> fun fact! the first part of the chapter was originally the ending of the last chapter, and the ending of this chapter originally had a part that has now been placed into the fourth chapter. also, it was my first time writing a semi-action scene so sorry if it was a bit wonky. i'll get better at it! 
> 
> also not to toot my own horn but i just glanced over the chapter to make sure the formatting's alright and the line "the birds are hungry and he is a feast" caught my eye and i'm shooketh. i like that line, a lot. 
> 
> anyway, as per usual, i hope you enjoyed this chapter!

**Author's Note:**

> if you want some hints, feel free to check out the [inspiration tag for the fic on my tumblr](https://immortalcockroach.tumblr.com/tagged/ff%3A-heroes-don%27t-look-like-they-used-to), or just come say hi! if you send me an ask about this fic (or any of my fics really) there's a high chance i'll explode with excitement and gush about it way more than i should.


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